


Not My Child

by Eipthor



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Rigel Black Series - murkybluematter
Genre: Angst, Gen, Inspired by The Rigel Black Chronicles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-29
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:54:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28398768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eipthor/pseuds/Eipthor
Summary: Set the summer after third year. Harry isn't the only one having a hard time dealing with her trauma.Not a new work. Moving over my MBM prompt games stuff from the RB discussion group on ff.
Relationships: James Potter & Harriet Potter | Rigel Black
Comments: 7
Kudos: 55





	Not My Child

James had nightmares. He'd had them off and on for years, whenever something particularly gruesome at work would spark them, but usually they dissipated much quicker than this. It had been eight days now. Nights really. Of waking up gasping because his Harry had almost died. His Harry, looking garishly thin and pale against familiar hospital wing sheets. His Harry, with her intestines torn, eating themselves from the inside and blood on her lip from poisons she'd consumed. His Harry, starving in a hole, breathing the sickening fumes of his decaying— murderous— once friend.

And he'd wake, too busy choking on his throat to remember how to breathe, how to scream, how to move any of the hundred muscles he needed to run to Harry's room and prove to himself that it wasn't real.

For it hadn't been. He reminded himself every night before bed that it hadn't been his child, that her lungs were breathing easy just two doors down the hall, but try as he might the glazed eyes in his dreams remained frightfully, terribly green.

He worried it would always be like this. Coming home from sickening, charred bodies in the lower allies, muttering how the ash on his daughters robes had come only from the floo, and hoping his psyche would believe it enough to let him sleep. Reminding himself that he couldn't scream at Sirius to get rid of his bloody snakes. Because his daughter couldn't be flinching from them. She couldn't be seeing pangs of the thirty foot snake that struck an ocean away from where she was. Safe. It was a trick of his eyes, made more vicious in dreams. Dreams that only Sirius and Archie had any right to.

He felt guilty for how lucky he was. His first thought whenever he heard of the newest tragedy that had befallen Archie (and what a terrible trend it was), was always gratitude that it hadn't been his safe, boring, wonderfully normal child. For Harry never rushed into adventure, or to some heroic rescue, as he or Sirius or Moony or now Archie would. She didn't risk her fingers in new, more devious prank inventions, or her arms in tricky quidditch maneuvers, that seemed so much more dangerous now that the next generation, and not him, was on the broom. She stayed in her room or the library and read about potions, and brewed potions, and came up with groundbreaking new potions theories and was safe and he hated it.

Because she didn't talk to him anymore. He didn't understand half the nonsense she said about brewing and she'd given up trying to tell him, but he could see how all the things she wasn't saying stained her face as she asked to be excused from the dinner table earlier and earlier. She was eating her food more quickly and eagerly now, gobbling food like she hadn't seen it in a month in her haste to escape him.

It had been fine when she was younger. Oh, he'd hated it then too, but compared to the present state of things it was heavenly. Back then her potions were just an irritating Snape-like habit, to be interrupted in favor of jokes and pranks and merry making. Back then she still smiled when he entered the room, rather than hide her work and hypothesize the most efficient series of words to make him leave. Her smiles seemed so much duller now, her gorgeous eyes less green, now that so few of those smiles were sent to him.

But then potions had started invading her letters, as though she could find nothing else to talk about at AIM, even though he knew at the very least she had that Hermione friend she refused to let them meet. He'd thought it would change when she'd returned for the summer, that he'd have his smiley girl back. But even when she was here she was still far away. She was so much more serious now, so much more driven, and always toward potions and away from him. Whole days spent in Diagon Alley, and brewing in the Potions Guild, with Snape of all people. Not that he wasn't proud, for all he didn't understand what she was doing, but even Remus got more time with her. How could it be that his own daughter, when expressing an interest in dueling, hadn't even considered her own head auror father? Was he so far from her mind or was this just another of the many ways she was avoiding him?

He hated it. He was losing his daughter. Losing her to potions of all things. And he couldn't be mad. Because Sirius, though he tried to hide it, was worried sick, because he felt to his bones he would be losing his own son soon. Not to anything so harmless as potions, but to the dark, or to whatever murderous thing came after him next.

So how could he complain about his beautiful daughter, when she was lucky and boring and normal and safe.

She was not, could not be, would never be, dead on the floor of some god awful cave. He remind himself of this, as she flinched from his questions (everything, from school to friends to weather in Diagon to her projects, was becoming perpetually "fine," wasn't it wonderful that things were so fine, he was practically biting his teeth off grinning at how "fine" it was), as she rushed early out of the house bound to return late (and she would return, he'd been checking every night since the Dancing Dragon burned), as he lay gasping from dreams that weren't real and abandonment that was.

But still peace, sleep, evaded him.

**Author's Note:**

> This was for the prompt James's boggart. It diverged slightly. If you're curious, it could also have been Harry dead in the cave (or something, Harry has no shortage of possible deaths) and James convinced it was a boggart, because how could it not be? His daughter is safe.


End file.
